The Importance of Iron and Advent of Steel

Life seems impossible now without iron, the cheapest and most important metal we use. Iron is extracted from a rocky material called iron ore. Like many elements, iron is too reactive to exist on its own in the ground. Instead, it combines with other elements, especially oxygen, in ores. The chemical process for extracting a metal from its ore is called smelting.

The first people who discovered how to extract iron from iron ore were the Hittites, a powerful group of people living in Asia Minor and Syria - south of the Black Sea. They kept the process a closely guarded secret. The Egyptians, for example, had to pay the Hittites in gold four times the weight of iron and once deceived them with lumps of bronze covered with a thin layer of gold.

The smelting of iron was the most important metallurgical development. Iron-ore is plentiful all over the world, therefore it may seem surprising that such a long time elapsed before iron was produced. The reason was that the furnaces used to smelt copper were not hot

Sometimes the early iron-workers, or smiths, accidentally produced a steel article instead of an iron one. Steel is iron with a small percentage of carbon in it. The carbon came from the fuel in the furnace in which the iron was heated. The smiths later learned from experience how to introduce this carbon when they wanted to produce steel.

Steel is stronger than iron, and can be made stronger still by quenching, which is the sudden cooling, in water or other fluids, from red-heat. However, steel becomes very brittle when made extremely hard, and as each smith used his own method the quality of the steel varied a great deal. Often a sword made by a poor smith snapped just when it was most needed.

In those days furnaces were not hot enough to melt iron completely. To extract the iron from the iron-ore, the ore was heated as much as possible (reducing the iron to a ‘spongy’ consistency) and then hammered. This forced the bits of rock and other impurities out, leaving the iron behind. Great skill and dexterity were required, especially as tongs had not been invented and the hot metal was handled with green sticks.

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